Speaking of stems, in a way. WARNING: RANT INCOMING after a bit of an intro.
This thread has more common sense among the handful of us here than I've seen combined elsewhere during my biking "career" that is more than a decade long now. And nothing else shows it better than anything related to bike fit, for example
@Omnis above wondering about swapping the cranks for longer ones and nobody said anything before seeing how it actually turns out. Which is exactly how it should go, nobody else can know if it works or not.
The know-it-all people, the so called serious bikers, take the Velominati mindset without any of the humour, turn it up to 11, and apply it religiously. Especially when bike fit is considered. I've heard the "if you're between two frame sizes, always pick the smaller one" so many times that I may just punch the next besserwisser using it smack in the middle of their face without any hesitation. They don't know such a thing as a frame too small, even in cases when it results in an abomination that needs a stem something like 30 mm longer than the geometry was designed around and a set back seatpost with the saddle pushed all the way back. The resulting bike steers like a rigid truck due to the overly long stem, is very prone to OTBing as the bar is far further forward than what the head angle was designed for, and the hip/knee section is probably all out of whack due to the saddle being several centimetres too far back just to have enough room between it and the bars.
Another thing that I again recently came across, and that actually sparked this post, is crank length. Read any article about it and the conclusion is always the same: the shorter the better. It's funny how no bike company puts 160 mm cranks on size L frames even though they apparently work best for everyone. Oh hell no they don't, I wouldn't put such ones on anything other than a kids' bike. They may work for someone who always rides at 120 rpm but that's about it. And crank length is, at least for me, one of the biggest things in how the bike performs. It's happened often enough now that it's not a coincidence, I'll try a bike and it doesn't seem to be moving like it should, and it turns out that it has 170 mm cranks. I had an otherwise pretty good cyclocross bike of my own for a while that wasn't any faster than a lightweight XC hardtail and it always felt like I just couldn't get the power down - 170 mm cranks. Tried a friend's enduro rig recently, absolutely no forward propelling power even when out of the saddle - 165 mm cranks. The difference to my preferred 175 mm isn't much in numbers, but it's very noticable.
Putting those two paragraphs into reality, my own bike is probably built all wrong according to the experts. I'm a bit on the short side but have longer than average legs, height 173 cm with an 80 cm inseam. They'd put me on an S/15,5" frame with 165 mm cranks in an instant with absolutely no objections, in reality I ride an M/17,5" with a pretty long 430 mm reach, a 60 mm stem, a zero offset seatpost with the saddle well forward to feel like I'm pedalling a bike and not a go-kart, and 175 mm cranks. The smaller frame would probably require at least an 80 if not 90 mm stem which would throw agility out of the window, the shorter cranks would force the saddle another 10 mm higher which would raise the CoG and move it forward, neither of which is good for handling. But it would be CORRECT.
